Liberty or Equality?

The Founding Fathers knew that you can’t have both

by Myron Magnet

With the fulminating on the left about inequality—“Fighting inequality is the mission of our times,” as New York’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio, summed up the theme of his postelection powwow with President Barack Obama—it’s worth pausing to admire anew the very different, and very realistic, modesty underlying Thomas Jefferson’s deathless declaration that all men are created equal. We are equal, he went on to explain, in having the same God-given rights that no one can legitimately take away from us. But Jefferson well knew that one of those rights—to pursue our own happiness in our own way—would yield wildly different outcomes for individuals. Even this most radical of the Founding Fathers knew that the equality of rights on which American independence rests would necessarily lead to inequality of condition. Indeed, he believed that something like an aristocracy would arise—springing from talent and virtue, he ardently hoped, not from inherited wealth or status.

In the greatest of the Federalist Papers, Number 10, James Madison explicitly pointed out the connection between liberty and inequality, and he explained why you can’t have the first without the second. Men formed governments, Madison believed (as did all the Founding Fathers), to safeguard rights that come from nature, not from government—rights to life, to liberty, and to the acquisition and ownership of property. Before we joined forces in society and chose an official cloaked with the authority to wield our collective power to restrain or punish violators of our natural rights, those rights were at constant risk of being trampled by someone stronger than we. Over time, though, those officials’ successors grew autocratic, and their governments overturned the very rights they were supposed to protect, creating a world as arbitrary as the inequality of the state of nature, in which the strongest took whatever he wanted, until someone still stronger came along.

In response, Americans—understanding that “kings are the servants, not the proprietors of the people,” as Jefferson snarled—fired their king and created a democratic republic. Under its safeguard of our equal right to liberty, each of us, Madison saw, will employ his different talents, drive, and energy, to follow his own individual dream of happiness, with a wide variety of successes and failures. Most notably, Federalist 10 pointed out, “From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results.” That inequality would be a sign of the new nation’s success, not failure. It would mean that people were really free.

The democratic republic that the American Revolution brought into being, however, contained the seeds of a new threat to natural rights, Madison fretted. Yes, the new nation will operate by majority rule, but even democratic majorities can’t legitimately overturn the fundamental rights that it is government’s purpose to safeguard, no matter how overwhelming the vote. To do so would be just as grievous a tyranny as the despotism of any sultan in his divan. It would be, in Madison’s famous phrase, a “tyranny of the majority.” As Continental Congressman Richard Henry Lee put it, an “elective despotism” is no less a despotism, for all its democratic trappings.

How would such a tyranny occur? Almost certainly, Madison thought, it would center on “the apportionment of taxes.” Levying taxes “is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality, yet there is perhaps no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party, to trample on the rules of justice. Every shilling with which they overburden the inferior number is a shilling saved to their own pockets.” How easy for the unpropertied many to expropriate the wealth of the propertied few by slow erosion, decreeing that they should pay more than a proportionate share of the public expenses. How seductive for the multitudinous farmers to levy taxes on the much smaller number of merchants or bankers or manufacturers, while exempting themselves. How tempting for the majority who have debts to transfer money secretly and silently away from the minority who are their creditors by debasing the currency, so that the real value of what they owe steadily shrinks, as Madison well remembered from the ruinous inflation of the Revolutionary War years. And a year before the Constitutional Convention, Madison recalled, the debt-swamped farmers of western Massachusetts had cooked up, in Shays’s Rebellion, still more “wicked and improper” schemes for expropriating the property of others: trying to close the courts at gunpoint to prevent foreclosures on their defaulted mortgages and even demanding the equal division of property.

So as chief architect of the Constitution, designed to give the federal government sufficient power to protect citizens’ basic rights—above all, the power to tax, whose lack under the Articles of Confederation had made the Revolutionary War longer and grimmer than it would have been if Congress had had sufficient means to buy arms and pay soldiers—Madison proceeded with his heart in his mouth, fearful that such augmented power made a tyranny of the majority all the more possible. His main challenge at the Convention, as he saw it, was to guard against precisely that outcome. So while four of the 18 specific powers that Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress concern the levying of taxes and the borrowing and coining of money to “provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States”—taxes that “shall be uniform throughout the United States”—eight of the rest deal with spending only for military and naval purposes, while the “general welfare” powers extend only to building post offices and post roads; establishing federal courts; protecting intellectual property by copyrights and patents; and regulating bankruptcies, naturalization, and interstate and foreign commerce. Not content merely to limit and define explicitly the federal government’s power, Madison made sure that the Constitution divided it up among several branches, limiting the power that any single individual or official body could wield and putting each jealously on guard against any other’s attempt to seize a disproportionate share. Moreover, all these officials (except the judges) were elected representatives of the people: they were the agents through whom Americans, who had no rulers, governed themselves.

But why was the liberty that Madison so mightily struggled to protect so precious? Americans knew how grievous its opposite was, both from the enslaved blacks they saw all around them as well as from their knowledge that their own forebears had fled British persecution of non-Anglican Protestants or European persecution of all Protestants, denied even freedom to express their own beliefs. They knew what man could inflict on man. But of all the Founders, Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton gave the most positive, eloquent, and inspiring answer to that question—though, in fact, he thought that he was answering a question about economics. Illegitimate, orphaned, and poor, Hamilton dreamed big dreams as a teenage clerk, sitting on his countinghouse stool on a small West Indian island whose only business was sugar and slaves. Ambition burned within him, along with a keen but unformed sense of his own talent. He knew he could be something other than he was. But what or how, he didn’t foresee. Maybe a war would come, he daydreamed, and give him his chance.

Read more at : http://www.city-journal.org/2014/24_2_liberty-or-equality.html